What was your longest burn?

[Ultimate Steve]

Exactly as the title says. What was your longest ever burn you had to do in KSP?

As I am writing this, the KSS Magician is undergoing a 55 minute escape burn. Only 10 minutes to go! I don't know what I'd do without physics warp.

Another long burn was the time I sent a 30KM/s solar escape probe, but I have forgotten how long that took.

[wumpus]

You might as well subtitle this "who uses ion engines"?

I've only done few minute burns, tops.  But how many kicks at periapsis, that is another question.

[HoloYolo]

45 minutes with nuclear engines.

[cantab]

I've done multi hour burns before now. Time to put on back-to-back reruns of QI or Top Gear or Mythbusters and relax.

[Archgeek]

I think I've done a 50-odd minute nuke burn to see if a ship would reach thermal equilibrium while doing some thermal testing shenanigans.  Oddly, my ion burns have been shorter so far.

[Mjp1050]

Good Grief! 

I've got a 17 minute burn coming up for a Jool transfer. I suspect that I have not unlocked the full potential of this game...

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

17 min 37 sec for the Kassini Sarnus probe with Kuygenz lander

[Mastikator]

Over an hour with ion engines. I was not present for 90% of the burn mind, just set up a maneuver node, start the burn. Leave the computer and run errands, come back and "oh crap it's still not done"

I don't use ion engines anymore

[septemberWaves]

Whilst not a single burn, I did spend about three hours once lowering my orbit around a modded gas giant (I can't remember which one) via something in the range of twenty consecutive periapsis burns.

[Archgeek]

3 minutes ago, Mastikator said:

Over an hour with ion engines. I was not present for 90% of the burn mind, just set up a maneuver node, start the burn. Leave the computer and run errands, come back and "oh crap it's still not done"

KAC is the best for this, set an alarm for when you want to start the burn, then another alarm set to actually pause the game 20 minutes into the burn, then another 20 minutes after that, then 10, then 5.  Set the engines running, go do something else, then come back to unpause and check/correct your vector.  I like to handle the last 5 minutes manually, but you can do another 2-3 min alarm if you like.

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

I think I was burning for ~4 hours real time when I had a TWR of 0.03, framerate less than 10 FPS, and a craft that could not be phsywarped.  Then 1.0.3 came out the next day and broke the save.

[Ultimate Steve]

@Mad Rocket Scientist I think you won... what in the world was that craft for? Do you have any pics?

[Gojira1000]

Due to distance from the sun and throttling back the ion drive - 5.5 hours last night on a Saturn capture.

Yaaaaaaay.

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

8 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

@Mad Rocket Scientist I think you won... what in the world was that craft for? Do you have any pics?

It was my constellation mission pack DTV, with my old computer:

And here's a couple of pics of the DTV after 1.0.3 broke it:

[purpleivan]

I had some seriously long burns flying this thing.

It was for the How fast can you make a ship go. As I remember one of the stages took 3 hours to consume all its fuel and as the intention was to get the vehicle up to the highest speed possible (I got up to 90877.7m/s while flying really close to the sun) while zooming in towards Kerbol, then there was no practical limit on how long the burns could take.

[johnsonwax]

I've been doing 24-32 hour long burns the last few nights, trying to move a 4.5 million ton class E asteroid into a aerobrake orbit using an entirely too small tug with 4xLV-N engines. 

Set up the attitude with MechJeb, tune the fuel rate to the ISRU rate so it doesn't run out, physics warp 4, and go to bed. It's working - changed inclination 20 degrees and periapsis by 50km. At that rate I should have no problem pulling it into the desired orbit while only consuming about 0.05% of the recoverable resources from the asteroid - though it'd take an additional 16 days of continuous burning.

And with that demonstrated tonight I'll hyperwarp it into the desired aerobrake orbit so I can get on with things. The final post-aerobrake maneuver should only take about 4 hours (1 hour warped). 

[Just Jim]

Not counting Ions, my longest is about 25 minutes with this ship:

It's got 4 Nerv's, plus a bunch of radiators, and did much better than I planned.  I was using it in my Emiko story, and I wanted it to overheat and blow up to get some screenshots. But to my surprise, and slight annoyance...lol... the Nerv's didn't overheat badly, even after 20 minutes!!  In the end I had to rebuild it with a couple extra hidden internal engines to get it to blow up like I wanted. 

[johnsonwax]

21 minutes ago, purpleivan said:

I had some seriously long burns flying this thing.

It was for the How fast can you make a ship go. As I remember one of the stages took 3 hours to consume all its fuel and as the intention was to get the vehicle up to the highest speed possible (I got up to 90877.7m/s while flying really close to the sun) while zooming in towards Kerbol, then there was no practical limit on how long the burns could take.

Way back in the day we had a 'how fast can you hit the surface of Kerbin' challenge and sent a pretty similar ion powered ship up with 40K or so ISP, reached a solar orbit, then reversed course into a retrograde orbit and hit Kerbin head-on at ~20K m/s (I think it was 22K). There was no heating yet, so no chance of burnup, but the atmosphere did slow me down remarkably well. I think it was a 12 hour burn or maybe more. 

With a more reasonable sized ship, pushing that 4megaton asteroid I indicated above into a sungrazer orbit would get some absurd speeds since you can mine it continuously for fuel for the entire multi-week burn. Hmm... 

[RA3236]

Not including Ions, mine was an hour and a half, ejecting out of the solar system in GalacticNeighborhood.

[Brownhair2]

I don't remember but I'd say ~10 minutes most. Maybe more. I don't like ion engines.

 

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

2 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

@Mad Rocket Scientist I think you won... what in the world was that craft for? Do you have any pics?

 

1 hour ago, johnsonwax said:

I've been doing 24-32 hour long burns the last few nights, trying to move a 4.5 million ton class E asteroid into a aerobrake orbit using an entirely too small tug with 4xLV-N engines. 

[...]

Set up the attitude with MechJeb, tune the fuel rate to the ISRU rate so it doesn't run out, physics warp 4, and go to bed. It's working - changed inclination 20 degrees and periapsis by 50km. At that rate I should have no problem pulling it into the desired orbit while only consuming about 0.05% of the recoverable resources from the asteroid - though it'd take an additional 16 days of continuous burning.

And with that demonstrated tonight I'll hyperwarp it into the desired aerobrake orbit so I can get on with things. The final post-aerobrake maneuver should only take about 4 hours (1 hour warped). 

I'll happily hand over my gold medal to you.  

[Fluburtur]

I did a burn to capture in Jool orbit with two ions at 0.4kn each, it took a few hours and I used cheats to finish it because it was taking too damn long.

Friendly advice, one gigantor solar array is enough per ion drive up to Duna, do not go beyond.

[kiwi1960]

13 minutes ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

 

I'll happily hand over my gold medal to you.  

OH NO YOU DON'T..... those are non transferable awards and only the Kerbal President can issue them.

(The President will award another one to Johnsonwax once he has received advice about handing over an award to a registered trademark!)

Edited June 28, 2016 by kiwi1960

[Ultimate Steve]

1 hour ago, johnsonwax said:

16 days of continuous burning.

 

15 minutes ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

I'll happily hand over my gold medal to you

 

2 minutes ago, kiwi1960 said:

only the Kerbal President can issue them.

I, president of my KSP savegames, issue the platinum medal to @johnsonwax! I would never have the patience for even a one day burn.

[HazelPine]

I once got a 4 hour burn to Kerbin. I kind of meant to recover a duna probe, but I left it for too long (it wasn't ion) and the solar orbit was a line running through the system. Had to burn back into a solar orbit and come home. I had to install MJ and Hyperedit just to bring it home, MJ for piloting and HE for fueling up the ship every 30 min.